I’m an independent researcher and educator. I’m committed to building respectful and collaborative ways of working with others, to learning and creating with them ways to explore and make changes in the world that make a difference in their lives. I’ve been fortunate to work with people in many different circumstances and privileged to know and learn from generous and creative people along the way.
Dororthy Smith, the founder of Institutional Ethnography, has been my teacher, mentor, colleague and friend since I first went to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto to work with her. Her boundless curiosity and generosity are an enduring inspiration.
Before coming to to work with Dorothy in 1987, I had done undergraduate studies in anthropology at the University of Toronto and with the brilliant French Canadian Cambridge scholar Michel Verdon at the University of Guelph. In my undergraduate and Masters Degree studies there, I had another radical teacher and mentor, Eleanora Cebotarev. With her encouragement I participated in community development and adult education movements that were going on in the 70s and 80s in Canada – in events and workshops given by organizations such as the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE), Ontario Community Development Association, International Development Research Centre, and the University of Massachusetts with the Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire and dynamic American organizer Stanley Aronowitz. Eleanora worked with women in Ecuador, Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Chile, and elsewhere, working with communities and universities, doing what she called institution building.
I first read Dorothy Smith’s ‘Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology’ in a ‘methods’ course with Eleanora. That reading changed the course of my life. While reading, I experienced Dorothy speaking to me, describing precisely my experience of living in two distinct modes of work and consciousness – one at home and another in the university – and issues emerging from that ‘disjuncture.’ I went on to teach Rural Sociology and Social Change courses at Guelph. With a husband working in another city and two young daughters, I didn’t plan to do a PhD. But a year later I went to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE/UT) to learn from Dorothy, where she was teaching the Social Organization of Knowledge and developing a radically different social science later called Institutional Ethnography. I’ve worked with her since.
Learn More About Institutional Ethnography
Developing a dissertation project and its methods
During my first year at OISE in Toronto, I became involved with other residents where I lived to contest a developer’s proposal to build in a small ravine in my neighbourhood, and I used the City’s 3-page Notice of Public Meetings for my ‘botonizing’ exercise in my first class with Dorothy Smith. Much later, the significance of this exercise became my account of the power of texts in the public process of land development.
At the same time I was developing a graphical mapping method to track the text-based work and processes I was engaged in, in order to understand and intervene effectively in them. I was learning from asking planners, engineers and city councillors about their work and the texts. Mapping rigorously work-text-work sequences was a way to see how people’s work and ‘the process’ were being put together in time and talk and texts being produced and circulated and read and discussed. It produced a practical working knowledge for me – at first not something I thought I would actually include in my dissertation. My dissertation was my first institutional ethnography, and where I showed mapping and its conventions. Its work has been useful in different circumstances for me and for others.
Mapping is how I work with institutional ethnography.
For me it’s integral to doing IE. It’s flexible, mobile. I’ve used it in many different ways and places with people, in training and co-research, and as it turns out it’s useful for making effective change.
- Workplace process mapping
Working as a lecturer and administrator at Guelph, I used work process mapping in my workplace, beginning in the academic advising work I did every day. The work went on in several programme advising offices across campus, one of which I headed, and as a result, the interim director of Athletics asked me to do a mapping session with coaches and program staff in the university athletics department. - In a large community-based research programme with 8 projects working with rural women’s organizations I used mapping with women’s employment, farm and community organizations that wanted to make changes in service delivery organization, federal agricultural policy development and municipal services funding.
- Teaching a Special Topics graduate course on Doing Effective Organizational Advocacy WorkFive exceptional graduate students – each working in a professional capacity – learned mapping and made significant discoveries that they took back to their workplaces to assist in redesigning workplace processes. Tracking their own work and opening up the work processes that were the institutional context they worked in, was vivid and powerful.
- Providing training and assistance to Indigenous organizationsProviding training and assistance to Indigenous organizations, with a goal to assist them in their research and projects to make changes that they want that will help their communities, has been a highlight for me in doing this work.
- Co-research with Six Nations of the Grand River Territory
- Building Change on and off Reserve: Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Turner and Bomberry, in Palgrave’s Handbook of Institutional Ethnography (2021): Free Sample | Link to Purchase
- Designing and delivering Institutional Ethnography and mapping workshops and Intensive Working Weeks with Dorothy. It is a pleasure meeting and working with many dedicated institutional ethnographers and learning from them. Surprises happen. For example, an impromptu mapping session with researcher Barbara Imle during a 2019 Working Week.
- The 20-minute video shows the process of developing a concrete starting place, focus and direction for Barbara’s research into the Adult Conservatorship process – a complex institutional process that takes away the rights of individuals with disabilities in California, USA, to make decisions for themselves . The full video shows the one hour, 20-minute interactive mapping of this process, in which individuals’ and professionals’ coordinated work processes are identified, tracked and made visible. The video was taken by workshop participant Shivaani Selvaraj.
– Liza McCoy, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Canada
– Marjorie DeVault, Professor Emerita (Sociology), Syracuse University, USA
– Barbara Imle, PhD candidate, Sociology, Portland University, USA